You know how Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan won't stop lying about how President Obama has "gutted" welfare reform by giving states more flexibility on how to administer the work requirement? And how all of the fact-checkers who have checked have said that their claim is bullshit?

Here's another fact-check, about another effort to end the work requirement in welfare reform. Except this time the effort is coming from House Republicans.

The legislation — H.R. 4297, The Workforce Investment Improvement Act — was unveiled in March by Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC) and cosponsored by six Republican colleagues. Among them was Education & Workforce Chairman John Kline (R-MN), who passed the bill through his committee in June.

So the bill has made it through the committee, ready for floor action, if the House actually had floor action on anything other than abortion, Obamacare repeal, or naming post offices. That means the bill has the endorsement of the committee of jurisdiction, and the chairman of the committee, a member of the GOP leadership team. The bill would "workforce training by letting states slash redundant programs and consolidate them with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) welfare program — into one Workforce Investment Fund (WIF)."

It would also, according to the nonpartisan research arm of the Congress, the Congressional Research Service, get rid of the restrictions in the 1996 welfare law requiring work.

"Thus, for example, if TANF funds were consolidated into the WIF, TANF program requirements (e.g., work requirements) may no longer apply to that portion of funding because the TANF funding would not exist (i.e., it would be part of the WIF and thus subject to WIF program requirements)," CRS concluded in a memo.

Making this all more insane, the Education & Workforce Committee passed legislation Thursday that would block Obama's welfare waivers to states. In other words, Rep. Kline just pushed through his committee a bill that repudiates a bill that he pushed through his committee three months ago. Put that in an ad, Romney.

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When it comes to budget and taxes, Mitt Romney's strategy is to sound like he's explaining things without actually explaining anything. Make big promises about lowering taxes and balancing the budget while denying that he'd accomplish that any of the ways it is actually possible to accomplish it. So when George Stephanopoulos pressed him on how exactly all this will work, Romney, as usual, ran in rhetorical circles, finally coming to this point:

Considering this is a man who thinks $362,000 is "not very much" money, I guess it was possible he'd think people making $200,000 to $250,000 were downright poor. But this is also a man running for president of a country in which the median household income, the amount that half of households earn less than and half of households earn more than, is around $50,000 a year. Four to five times what the average family makes is not middle income. I can't believe that's something that has to be said.

On a policy level, Romney's claim that he would reduce taxes on people making less than $250,000 is ... well, it's a lie, for one thing. The few specifics he's offered on his tax and budget policies make that clear. If it was something he actually intended to do, though, it wouldn't be very controversial. President Obama wants to keep tax levels the same for families making less than $250,000—it's just that Obama sees $250,000 as a ceiling where Romney sees it as a floor. That's how out of touch Romney is. The $250,000 that most of us understand as representing the threshold to the top 1 percent is his idea of the struggling middle. People making less? An afterthought, like he doesn't quite believe they're real.

Why would conserving energy be dropped? Shouldn't that be a conservative principle? Once again, anything that the Democrats support has to be shut down by the Republicans. Just because. Bloomberg:

The Republican Party platform for 2012 contains no mention of energy efficiency, leading some observers to conclude that the issue of energy conservation--long considered bipartisan—is becoming increasingly politicized.

The omission is "a little bit surprising" given support from previous Republican platforms and from Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney himself during his time as governor of Massachusetts, said Andrew Goldberg, chief lobbyist for the American Institute of Architects, a group that supports energy-efficient buildings.

Conserving energy is good all around, including good for the wallets of average Americans. Why or how it has become politicized by the GOP is hard to answer.Read the rest of this post...

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Hysterical. There's not much else to say when China's own state news agency calls out Romney like this.

While addressing a rally in the U.S. state of Virginia on Thursday, Romney, just as what he has done along his campaign trail, opened fire on China, claiming that it was Beijing's undervalued RMB currency that forced U.S. manufacturers out of job.

What is more sensational is that this millionaire GOP candidate has vowed to declare China a currency manipulator on the first day of his presidency if elected.

Yet it is rather ironic that a considerable portion of this China-battering politician's wealth was actually obtained by doing business with Chinese companies before he entered politics.